¶ Intro
Hey, folks, we're recording at Halburne's Access Summit at the New York Stock Exchange and joining me, it's Chris de Fontaine, who is the co CEO and co founder of Defense. Chris, great to have you.
Thank you for having me, Tony.
Chris. Defense is doing some amazing things and I'm excited to go through the details. Let's keep it off with your background. Tell us about where you're from and how'd
¶ Chris' background
you make your way into crypto.
I'm a European. I'm half French, half Swedish, so I grew grew up in Paris, lived a bit in South Africa, spent a lot of years in Sweden and Stockholm. So I had this multicultural background, but mostly European. And yeah, studied philosophy in France and then dropped out and just built companies. The first companies were in hr tech and sports Tech, did social apps around multiple experiments, not all of them were were successful, but we did raise money,
et cetera, et cetera. And then all suddenly I met my wife, Clarius, who's my co founder, and she she's been in banking for ten years Goldman Bammel, Credit Agricole, mostly here in New York and you know, she she stumbled upon private key security matters and blockchain while working for the bank, and but she had never built a company. And so we kind of met, uh somewhere in the middle where you know, she would bring the industry expertise and I would be, you know, kind of tickled by
the idea of joining her. Was intimidating at first because you know, like cybersecurity and finance and crypto like had nothing to do with that whole space. Being in the consumer facing product side very deep b to be very deep tech. And but you know, I know, I knew how to hire, I knew how to fundraise, I knew how to build a deck, I knew how to feel
how an organization should kind of evolve over time. And so yeah, my operational expertise mixed with her financial industry expertise kind of came together and we built a company.
It's amazing. So tell us about defenses services and what you offer and solutions and things like that.
Yeah, we're in the product category that this industry refers to as wallet infrastructure wallet services. What it basically is is the combination of a key management service. Traditionally speaking, so keys your private keys right that we secure or that we help you secure. And the notes the notes of a blockchain that we index so you can read information from it, you can write information to it. So that's like the kind of core objects of a wallet.
And what we do is provide an interface on top of these objects as well, so that the developer experience and also the kind of user experience becomes pleasurable and safe with authentication and identity and access management and authentication. So it's like over time you add all these integrations.
We've done as well with exchanges so that these wallets can buy and sell with compliance data, so that you know, these wallets, these same wallets can block transactions when they see some frauduenent address with payment service providers when they want to send these wallets want to send money to
Brazil or whatever. It's becoming overtime and orchestration platform. We've like evolved into some kind of operating system, a middleware that sits within banks, within payment service providers, trading apps, all robinhood things like that. And so yeah, we've become with now three hundred more customer of three hundred and twenty customers, we've become like a a credible platform that helps you interact with blockchains and build your workflows.
That's incredible. And your wallet as a service product is
¶ Wallet as a Service
that pretty much plug and play any institution or exchange what American use your service and build their wallets out.
Yeah, historically it was. It still is because if you're a startup, very cloud first using the most modern technologies, et cetera, that's what you want. You want an SDK, you want quick access to everything, self served motions, you want all of that. And that's what we have. That's
what we built to start with. But as we got in deeper and deeper into institutional finance, we also realized that, you know, you had a lot of companies out there that had custom builds, legacy technologies, old stuff, complex stuff, much more regulatory requirements, security risk, compliance requirements than a young fintech starting two years ago. And yeah, you have to play ball with these guys if you want to kind of help them join the unschain world and make
a buck, right, So you need to. We had to over time become this platform that's also good at deploying in various we call them heat your genius environments. But you know, like quirky environments, not your like just aws autobahn. You know, it's like, let's take an example, a bank in Turkey. They don't have any WIST data centure, yet the regulator will tell them, you need to have this mission critical stuff running in my country under certain like
parameters and certain things. And you need to be aware of these parameters. You need to know what the regulators want, et cetera, et cetera. And it's all about sovereignty of that country, risk tolerance from their perspective, the Turkish perspective, or the South Korean one or whatever. So yeah, we've became good at that too.
And are you seeing a lot of demand now that let's say crypto is in a much better place here in the United States. A lot of institutions on Wall Street, even in New York Stock is launching things that they're coming to you saying, hey, Chris, we need to get this billed.
Out one percent. There are still you know, the Clarity Act, et cetera. There are still hurdles, there's still a refinement. But I'm I mean, I have the luxury to have been in this space for six years now, so I've gone through you know, uh, the early days where the word custody was a devilish, diabolical term than the nft D five summer. Then you know FTX the whole thing, right, So I remember a year ago before Trump, when like no one wanted to even hear about the word crypto anymore.
One year later, one must admit everything's changed. So from that perspective, yes, we see a lot of a lot of financial institutions across the board in every single country. The use case have matured, they have definitely. Blockchain is seen as just now, you know, interesting technology and and and the mindset is open, and it's like, what can we do with this interesting technology? How can we rewire
the financial back end? Because at the end of the day, blockchain is first and foremost an invitation to revamp rewire the back end, the back office of finance. Right people, it's it's it's easy to get caught in the shiny aspects of consumer facing products and you know, the latest ux and whatever. The truth is the biggest value in where you have the most work still to be done.
Much like you know, you look at a country, you still want you want to work, You want to build the roads and the bridges, before you start working on you know, the Louis Vuitton shop, you know, like you got to get there. Yeah, exactly. So we're in that phase historically where the big kind of groundwork still has to be done. And and yeah, I mean IBM is like a big, big example of that.
Right.
The fact that we sign this partnership that took six months to deliver, which is a fairly short time amount of time frame for such a large company that runs seventy percent of the Internet and has been around for one hundred and fourteen years old, fourteen years for that company to sign with us and white label our entire platform and sell it as their own is Yeah, it's a phenomenal change compared to a year ago.
Oh absolutely. And that's called the IBM Digital Asset Haven
¶ IBM Digital Asset Haven
if I'm not mistaken, correct, So tell us about that, you know, what are as much as you can what are the moving parts and components of that? How are they using your services and how are they pitching that to their clients?
So they have a long standing history uh in bock chain, right, like IBM has been at the forefront. They have been investing in what we call the hyper Ledger Foundation. Yes, they built the fabric private chain, so you know, they know their their thing, they know their stuff. Now what's happened is that they they've been partnering with a bunch of classic wallet vendors over the years, fire Blogs and Mettaco that got acquired by Ripple, Custody, uh Taurus and others.
Attaka got acquired by Ripple, and they created some some issues, let's say with with you know, how to continue because when a when a financial service like Ripple acquires you know, credibly neutral technology provider, all suddenly all the other financial services on top they you know, they'll start looking at that very same piece of tech that is now governed by and another financial service with another pair of glasses. You know. It's just the risk paradigm shifts that has
led IBM to look for their new champion. And we were one of the names that popped up and we started working with them, and and they thought that we were the most advanced but also the team that was not not a team that was too big, that could
not consider their requirements. So we we were at we had at the right level, I would say, because we were willing to put in the legwork and and yeah, fast forward the digitalast to haven platform is is our platform running inside the IBM infrastructure, which means that you know, if you're a bank and you look to start moving things on chain, your trades, your flows, your your cash, your deposit, you want tokenize them, whatever you want to do,
you now you know you need to think about multiple things. Among these things is vendor onboarding. Vendor on boarding takes time. You know, you need to go through a whole list of hold a big checklist. The procurement team is very strict and if you don't take all these boxes, you don't get in and it could take six, nine, twelve
months to onboard a new vendor. So you know, when you're in a rush in these kind of markets, a thing like IBM that's already pre onboarded as a certified vendor, has been for a long time, takes all the boxes. Everyone's very happy because it's just like a new line in the contract they've already signed and bingo there off
to the races. So that's like one of one important like go to market distribution adoption aspect to this whole thing, the trust because like you know, work startup, we could get acquired fireblocks even that eight billion dollar valuation on paper could get acquired. So IBM has been the long for one hundred and fourteen years old. They're making more
than sixty billion dollars a year in revenue. They're not going anywhere, right, and so I mean to some degree, IBM is you know what bitcoin itself would like to be in one hundred years, you know. So from in some sense, it's like if IBM gets in the mother the bedrock is now like on chain, on chain compatible, gives gives you access to the on So that trust, that level of comfort for an institution like City, JP, Morgan, Swift, whatever is like gold right because now it's like all
lights are green, we can go ahead. From a technical perspective, then of course they need to deal with their regulator and so forth and so, but you know, it's a big percentage of the loading bar that's now all good. So so they have They do have a lot of products in their catalog HSMs classes like their their well
known HSMs, their confidential compute called HPVs. They have a thing called Offline Signing Orchestrator OZO, which helps you kind of keep things offline and if you want to go online with data like keys, there's a SaaS kind of there are circuit breakers and interesting things that will not prevent direct like offline to online movements, but it's going to be segregated and it's going to kind of follow a lot of security hygiene steps, and we're trying to
make sure that our platform is completely compatible with their the entire product catalog running inside iBIM cloud and IBM environments, which is I would say, and I'll stop there. It's like the I would say, the it's the you know when we met with IBM, I didn't know them that well, Like you know, the kind of cliche picture you have of them as a startup or is like it's a
dusty company, it's an old company. You know. The truth is I was impressed because especially when you go to that in Poukeepsi, you go to that quantum farm they have like it's not dusty at all. It's actually the thing that's like they invented the computer in the sixties. You know, they helped Armstrom go to the Moon with their computers and they're still investing as no other company on Earth on AI and Quantum and all the stuff that's like Frontier and even Google is not like at
the same level. But the thing is what people don't understand is IBM is Ferrari, Google, Aws and all these others are mid class cars. It's like Ford, right, so of course maybe Ford is making more money than Ferrari, probably right, and for people know them more because they're everywhere, et cetera. Not everyone has a Ferrari. But the thing is like the level of the compute of a mainframe, those big machines that you buy, they cost a million plus.
It's like buying a nice pair of shoes that you'll keep for ten years versus like a pair of Nikes that you'll kill in two years. That's the difference. Like it's when you buy IBM, you buy autonomy, you buy sovereignty. You buy the ability for your country, for your government, for your bank, for healthcare, for like all the mission critical infrastructure pieces in our societies, military, whatever, finance is
part of those. You buy the ability to be able to compute inside your offices, inside your data data centers, inside your country with incredible, incredible high speed and compute power. I can't remember the rate shows, but like one IBM Z can compute as much as like one thousand service inside a do lists something like that, right, So it's a piece of jewelry. And it makes sense that IBM technology, which is one of the biggest, you know, enterprise tech
firms in the world, gets into this. As we are moving from databases to blockchains, they want to be part of that transition as well and help right Yeah.
Oh absolutely, And do you feel that's a model kind
¶ Crypto adoption model
of where they've taken your technology, Like you mentioned, they have the brand, they have the relationships, the network already, they go out there and then they have their clients adopted the technology and that helps to bring in customers and retail folks on chain.
Totally. I'm I am one hundred percent convinced and they are too that IBM is not only just a vendor. It's an unlocker, it's a it's an enabler, it's a bridge. It's really this thing that will have it perfer formative effect on the increased adoption of blockchains, for sure.
Absolutely, so, Chris, what's on your roadmap for this year?
Well, we have we have a bunch of things. I would say, I would say it's it's it's becoming you know, we provide a unified experience across fifty plus blockchains, and then if you add the third party services like chinelysis coin based this and that, it's like one hundred plus external sources, the networks of the chains and the third party apps. You know, it's becoming increasingly increasingly important for our customers to have a great admin experience. Right, we're
very inspired by what Whiz did for cloud. So Whiz is this cloud security company that got acquired a year ago by Google Record high evaluation, and they formulated this nice like proposition which is to create an orchestration layer
on top of Google Cloud Aws Azure. Because it's difficult when you have when you when you have all these users and you have these rules and access controls, et cetera, entrenched in all these environments across an organization, with different teams in different countries, et cetera, it's very hard to manage all of that. So just with sits on top as an orchestration layer and they help you troubleshoot in
real time. They give you like idiot proof, like you know, colors and experiences to know that oh, you know, there's a bug here, or there's something that needs to get checked here, or something has broken in my own automation,
et cetera. We think that you know the complexity of blockchains and where a key sit and where notes it and how transactions the status of transactions are they pending, confirmed, have they failed, whatever, All of that complexity and more needs to be managed, and you need to provide this nice developer experience, but also admin experience because the bank is not only the devs, right, it's the portfolio manager, it's the risk officer, it's the CISO, it's the trader.
So you have all these teams like sometimes in different countries and different subsidiaries of the bank, with the need for segregation of like you know, all these these environments, all these things, all these objects. So we're we're increasingly looking at providing that increase that enhanced admin experience for blockchains, transaction, life cycle management, all these things. Security has always been
a big thing, will continue to be. We love as much as we love the idea of deploying on prem and as much as it's a regulatory requirement, are our secrets. Our little passion is to keep working on the zero trust SaaS. So yeah, we'll want to kind of provide as much data integrity and security as possible over time.
That's exciting. Well, Chris, we're gonna have to do around two. We talked about it, where we go more adapt into all these things. But thank you so much and I'm looking forward to the updates.
Thank you much, Thank you.
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